This is game 07 of the 2012 baseball season.

In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 3 week of February.

February 19

1942 Unable to find relief from migraine headaches, Indian first baseman Hal Trosky retires from baseball.

Harold Arthur Trosky, Sr., born Harold Arthur Trojovsky and nicknamed “Hal”, was born November 11, 1912 in Norway, Iowa.

The first baseman’s career reached its apex in 1936, when he led the American League in runs batted in with 162, but he has been consigned to relative obscurity because his career overlapped the trio of Hall of Fame first basemen Jimmie Foxx, Hank Greenberg, and Lou Gehrig.

After an impressive schoolboy and amateur career, Trosky was courted with varying degrees of intensity by the Athletics, the Cardinals, and the Indians.  After graduating from high school, he was offered a minor league contract by the St. Louis Cardinals.  Not confident in how to proceed, he called on Bing Miller in nearby Vinton, IA.  Miller was then a member of Connie Mack’s powerhouse Philadelphia Athletics, a team that had just played in its second of three consecutive World Series.  Miller was delighted to speak with the boy.

Miller knew Trosky’s reputation and advised him to do nothing until Mr. Mack was consulted.  Trosky drove home quite content, but upon returning to Norway found his father seated in the kitchen with Cleveland Indians’ scout and Cedar Rapids native, Cyril Slapnicka.

Trosky later told Gordon Cobbledick, the baseball columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “I liked Slap, and after we talked baseball for a while he suggested I sign with him.”  Evidently, Slapnicka had been aware of Hal’s prowess, but hadn’t felt any urgency in pursuing him until he got wind of the Athletics’ possible interest.

After almost no deliberation, Hal chose the Indians.   He signed his first contract “Harold Trojovsky”, but from then on used the shorter “Trosky,” as did his siblings.  Ironically, a contract offer from Connie Mack arrived three days later.  Trosky returned the unsigned document with a note explaining what had happened and apologizing for the inconvenience.  He was touched that Mack took time to respond with his best wishes for the player’s future career.
Trosky was signed primarily as a pitcher, one who had the odd habit of hitting cross-handed but from the right side of the plate.  Slapnicka, in a visit to the park to check on his prospects, took player and manager aside and suggested Trosky retain his grip but switch to a left-handed batting stance.  The change was providential, as Trosky played 52 Mississippi Valley League games that summer as a converted first baseman and, in 162 at-bats, managed 49 hits for a respectable .302 batting average.

In 1933 Trosky began the season with the Toledo Mud Hens of the American Association.  At the close of the Mud Hens season, Cleveland called, and on September 11, 1933, Trosky started at first base.  Trosky went 0-for-3 against the Senators’ Monte Weaver, and would wait a full week before collecting his first major league hit on September 18, a home run off the Red Sox Gordon Rhodes.

The day before that first hit, September 17, provided a brush with baseball royalty.  In the second game of a doubleheader against the Yankees, Trosky was playing deep behind first base when Babe Ruth hit a screaming line drive down the line that carried the novice’s mitt almost halfway into right field.  Trosky later had the glove bronzed for his personal collection.

After retrieving the glove, the rookie had to sift through the conflicting emotions of awe in the presence of a living legend and of fear in the form of Lou Gehrig striding to the plate.  If possible, Gehrig represented an even greater hazard to Trosky’s well-being than the Bambino, because Ruth generally hit high, arcing fly balls, while Gehrig could rip a vicious line drive off any pitch.

Trosky had to cover the bag with second base open, but against Gehrig the only chance to reel in a hard drive was found in playing farther back on the outfield grass.

The Babe must have divined Trosky’s fielding dilemma, because he whispered out the side of his mouth, “Don’t worry about holding me on, kid.  I ain’t going no place.   Just drop back a little and play it safe.  If he hit one at you up here, it would take your head off.”  Trosky backed off and, true to his word, Ruth stood just a few feet from first and awaited the Yankee onslaught.  It wasn’t that big a deal to the Babe, but Trosky never forgot that small kindness.

In 44 at-bats that month, spread over 11 games, Trosky hit .295 with a double and two triples and drove in eight runs.
In 1934, his first full year in the major leagues, he was little short of spectacular.  Trosky played every inning of all 154 games and hit .330 with 35 home.

The 1935 season marked an increase in Trosky’s confidence and erosion in his performance.  When he was mired in a September slump, a stretch in which he’d had exactly one hit in 40 at-bats, coach Steve O’Neill, his former manager at Toledo, suggested Trosky try hitting from the right side against the Senators.

The next day, in the opener of a doubleheader in Washington, Trosky came up in the first inning and took a right-handed stance.  He stunned his teammates by smoking an Orlin Rogers curve for a single.  After a left-handed out in the fifth, he hit from the right side again in the eighth inning and knocked a Leon Pettit pitch into the distant reaches of Griffith Stadium’s left field bleachers for his 23^rd home run of the year.  Overall in the two games, Trosky punched five hits in ten at-bats.  Three singles and a home run came from the right side, and one long double from the left.

After the “Sophomore Jinx” season of 1935, Trosky announced during spring training in 1936 that he wouldn’t be switch-hitting anymore.

The 1934 model Trosky returned for the 1936 campaign.  A mid-June spell in Lakeside Hospital, a result of a clot in his leg that developed following a batting practice accident, caused him to miss his only three games of the year.  Despite the setback, Trosky put together a 28-game hitting streak and broke his own team record for home runs in a single season when he hit number 36 against the Senators.

Although the American League pennant went to the Yankees, 1936 was a memorable year for Trosky, as he led the league in Runs Batted In and total bases. His Runs Batted In total over his first three seasons was greater than the totals amassed by Gehrig, Foxx, or Greenberg over their first three years.

By 1939, Trosky was named team captain. He agreed not only for the extra $500 stipend, but because he felt that he could serve as a buffer between some of the less confident players and their acerbic manager, Oscar Vitt.

In mid-season, though, Trosky did the unthinkable: he lifted himself from the lineup and let understudy Oscar Grimes play a few games at first.  Trosky never admitted it to the team, but there were times when his head absolutely ached.  The season ended with Trosky recording only 448 at-bats, the first season since his first that he appeared in less than 150 games.  It was becoming difficult for him to bring the necessary intensity to the park each day.  He was only 26 years old when the season ended, but the pain from the headaches sapped his vigor.

Over the winter the headaches faded.  Trosky consulted several doctors in Cleveland and in Cedar Rapids, but none was able to pinpoint the source of his discomfort.  As the frequency of attacks decreased, Trosky threw himself into his farming and family life, and by the end of the off-season, he was eager to return to baseball.

Events in 1940’s spring training provided unmistakable indications of how the Indians would perform on the field, but not even the closest observers could have predicted the off-field show that was gradually unfolding.  The players felt their manager was antagonistic and spiteful, despite the press’s portrayal of him as suffering and misunderstood.  The first week in June brought the cauldron to a boil.

On June 10, after a week of inconsistent play, the Indians were rained out in Boston and the players spent the day in the hotel lobby dissecting their misfortune.  The blame for the team’s struggles fell on Vitt.  Some of the players advanced the idea of trying to dump the manager, but team captain Trosky counseled patience. The slugger was a proud man, and wanted no part of pointing public fingers at anyone, even though Vitt’s words had repeatedly stung him.

The next evening, after an afternoon Red Sox blow-out of the Indians, Trosky spoke with Frank Gibbons of the Cleveland Press.  He told the scribe that the Indians could win the pennant with their current players, but had no chance as long as Vitt was the manager.  Gibbons cautioned Trosky to wait and see how things turned out before doing anything rash.  Ironically, it was the same advice Trosky had given his teammates earlier.

The following morning the players checked out of their rooms early.  At breakfast they again discussed solutions for the “Vitt problem.”  Later, on the train ride from Boston to Cleveland, veterans Ben Chapman and Rollie Hemsley reportedly called Lou Boudreau and Ray Mack to their berth and told the young infielders that some of the players were circulating a petition calling for Vitt’s ouster.  Boudreau and Mack, along with Al Smith, Beau Bell, Mike Naymick and Soup Campbell, were excused from participating.

In a meeting with the rest of the players, pitchers Mel Harder and Johnny Allen told the team that they would go to owner Alva Bradley alone to discuss the problems.  The team disagreed, but appointed Harder as their collective voice.

On June 13 real tragedy found Trosky.  As the team’s train pulled into the Cleveland station, Hal received word that his mother had died suddenly in Iowa.  Trosky went straight from the train station to the airport, while Harder called Alva Bradley’s office seeking an appointment with the owner.

Instead of sending Harder alone, ten more of the dissidents went to Bradley’s office en masse to show him the sincerity of their grievance.  The players were all seasoned veterans, men who worked in the off-season not by choice but by necessity, and they were men who understood the consequences of their actions.  Clearly, this was no idle grumbling about a stern taskmaster.  Vitt had wounded them deeply enough to spur those extraordinary measures.

The players told Bradley that Vitt had to go if the team was to compete successfully.  They outlined four specific grievances, each of which Bradley later confirmed as true, and demanded the owner take action.

Trosky even telephoned Bradley from the airport to ensure his absence wouldn’t be misconstrued.  Despite his personal misgivings about the action, the team captain would not even consider standing idly by while his teammates pressed the issue.

Bradley told the players that he would look into the matter and warned them that if word of the meeting was released, the players would be ridiculed forever.
The Indians won the game that afternoon, but it was the insurrection that was front-page news in The Plain Dealer the next morning. The headline for the story was physically larger on the printed page than that afforded to Hitler’s invasion of Paris. Bradley went on the record saying that he would take no immediate action regarding his manager or his players until he had a chance to talk with the team captain.

As far as Trosky’s involvement in the “Crybaby” incident, rumored so heavily by the writers, it probably was not nearly as great as some supposed.  Three days after the story broke, on the back page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, an apology of sorts was printed that stated that neither Oscar Vitt nor Hal Trosky had ever claimed that Trosky was bent on usurping Vitt’s authority.

A memo from Alva Bradley concerning the incident was discovered and published by the Cleveland News in 1951: “We should have won the pennant…our real trouble started when a group of 10 players came to my office and made four distinct charges against (Vitt) and asked for his dismissal.  The four charges made against Vitt, on investigations I have made, were 100% correct.”

Trosky finished the season batting.295.  His 93 Runs Batted In marked the first full major league season he had played in which he failed to drive in at least 100 runs.  He hit 39 doubles and a team-leading 25 home runs.  The headaches hit hard again in August and September, but Trosky loathed missing any game in the tight pennant race.  The Indians finished second, just one game behind Detroit.
One constant in the 1941 season was Trosky’s headaches.  They were striking with no notice and leaving a wake of debilitating agony.  For a hitter who made a living off fastballs, he was powerless against a blurry white apparition that he said sometimes looked “like a bunch of white feathers.”

Trosky played less and less.  The migraines were now almost unbearable, so on August 11, Cleveland began a seven game road trip without their slugger.

Trosky rejoined the team for its last stop in Chicago.  In the sixth inning of the opener of a doubleheader at Comiskey Park, Trosky’s Indian career came to an abrupt end when he fractured his thumb in a collision with White Sox pitcher Ted Lyons.  The slugger missed the final 39 games of the season and, as it turned out, never wore a Cleveland uniform again.  The Indians finished in a tie for fourth place with the Tigers.

In February 1942, Trosky told Gayle Hayes of the Des Moines Register that he wouldn’t be playing baseball that year. It was, he was quoted, “for the best interest of the Cleveland club and for myself that I stay out of baseball…I have visited various doctors in the larger cities in the United States and they have not helped me.  If, after resting this year, I find that I am better, perhaps I’ll try to be reinstated.  If I don’t get better, then my major league career is over.”

Trosky passed 1942 on his farm in Iowa.  In November 1943 the Indians sold his contract to the Chicago White Sox.

He played baseball in 1944 like a man with great talent who had been out of the game for two seasons. In April he logged several multi-Runs Batted In games, but he showed no consistency.  His play was mark ed by a succession of solid games followed by mediocre performances.

Headaches notwithstanding, Trosky managed 10 home runs in 1944, which was enough to lead his team in that category.  At the end of the season, with the White Sox in seventh place after winning only 71 times, Trosky called it quits again.

Trosky didn’t play in the 1945 season but the White Sox offered him a contract to play in 1946. He hit only .254 with two home runs and 31 Runs Batted In.  Despite Chicago’s offer to suit up again in 1947, the 34-year old Trosky knew it was time to hang up the spikes.
Trosky had a career .302 batting average, with a high of .343 in 1936.  He hit 228 career home runs and had 1012 Runs Batted In.

He is considered one of the best players to never make an all star team.  The probable reasoning behind it was he played during the time of Hall of Fame first basemen Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx, both of which had great seasons year after year.
Following his official release in February 1947, the White Sox hired Trosky as a scout.  Between 1947 and 1950, he traveled the tiny towns of eastern Iowa looking for “the next Trosky.”

Hal Trosky died June 18, 1979 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa at age 66.

A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by Bill Johnson.  It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org

Leave a comment at the BHP web site at baseballhistorypodcast.com or write a review on iTunes, search for Baseball History Podcast.

You can email me at baseballhistory@gmail.com.

Well, that’s it for today’s Baseball History Podcast.  I’ll see you later at the ballpark.

This is game 06 of the 2012 baseball season.

In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 2 week of February.

February 10

1916 After Chief Meyers is waived by the Giants to the Robins, Brooklyn owners Ebbets and Haughton disagree on his status. A coin toss, won by Ebbets, decides the catcher will remain with the team.

John Tortes Meyers, nicknamed “Chief”, was born July 29, 1880 in Riverside, California.

Meyers was a member of the Cahuilla tribe, also called the Mission Indians.

On the field, the strong but slow-footed Meyers was almost certainly the best offensive catcher of the Deadball Era.

As a Native American playing in the Deadball Era, Meyers couldn’t avoid being

saddled with the nickname “Chief,” but he did as much as any Native American of his generation to shatter the stereotypical image of the dumb Indian.  Meyers was far more sophisticated than most of his fellow players.

One reporter wrote of Meyers, “A strong love of justice, a lightning sense of humor, a fund of general information that runs from politics to Plato, a quick, logical mind, and the self-contained, dignified poise that is the hallmark of good breeding-he is easily the most remarkable player in the big leagues.”

During the summer of 1905 Meyers was catching in a tournament in Albuquerque when he caught the attention of a rival player named Ralph Glaze.  A baseball and football standout at Dartmouth College who later made the majors as a pitcher with the 1906-08 Boston Americans, Glaze thought the catcher could help his college team on both the gridiron and the diamond.  Pointing out that the school’s charter provided for the education of Native Americans, Glaze convinced Dartmouth alumni in his hometown of Denver to equip Meyers with cash, railroad tickets, and even an altered diploma because Meyers hadn’t completed high school.

With the assistance of a tutor, Meyers attended classes at Dartmouth during the 1905-06 school year and enjoyed his time there immensely, but college administrators discovered that his high-school diploma was false.  They offered to admit him if he completed a preparatory program, but when school let out the 25-year-old catcher instead signed a contract with Harrisburg of the independent Tri-State League.

The Harrisburg team “certainly laid themselves to make me a happy Indian,” Meyers told a reporter in 1909.  “I went to the clubhouse and nobody paid more attention to me than they did to the bat bag.”

Finally getting into a game on Independence Day, Meyers was assigned to catch a spitballer named Frank Leary who pitched a couple games for the Cincinnati Reds the following season.  Leary was intentionally crossing up Meyers, who finally stopped putting down signs.  Meyers recalled the incident, “I was getting it everywhere but my glove.  I had five passed balls in two innings.  Do you know, that did me more good than anything that ever happened to me?  It made me mad.  I had been timid and now I was mad enough to be brave.”

Meyers’ career took off after he found the courage to stand up to those who derided him.  After spending 1907 in the Northwestern League with Butte and 1908 with St. Paul of the American Association, Chief found himself in New York City as a 28-year-old rookie with the Giants at the end of the tumultuous 1908 season.  He failed to appear in a single game, but that winter the Giants traded Roger Bresnahan to the St. Louis Cardinals.  The following year Meyers shared the catching duties and in 1910 he became a regular, batting .285 to establish himself as one of the best-hitting catchers in the game.

The press, in New York and elsewhere, took an immediate liking to Meyers because he made more interesting copy than his teammates.  During rainouts or off-days, while the other players holed up playing cards or billiards, newspapers reported that Meyers would go out to do some historical sightseeing or watch a local college football team practice.  In Boston, wrote Bozeman Bulger, Meyers made a point of visiting the art museums where he spent hours touring the exhibits  Several writers noted that his favorite painting was “Quest for the Holy Grail,” the mural by Edwin Austin Abbey that hangs in the Boston Public Library.

After only two years in the majors, Meyers was popular enough for the vaudeville circuit.  At Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre on October 23, 1910, Meyers teamed up with Christy Mathewson in a vaudeville sketch entitled “Curves.”  Written by Bulger and produced by actress May Tully, the half-hour sketch featured the battery in a scene set at the Polo Grounds, with Tully playing an ardent spectator.  The players, in their home uniforms, demonstrated for Tully and the audience how to throw various pitches, and Meyers explained the workings of the catcher.

Tully then returned the favor by convincing Mathewson and Meyers to join her in vaudeville and by teaching them to act, which, according to Variety, “brings out a travesty drama with Meyers as the ‘bad Indian.’  Mathewson is the cowboy who comes to the rescue of the forlorn maiden and overcomes the ‘bad Indian’ by hitting him in the head with a baseball.”  Today it sounds as improper as a blackface minstrel show, but at the time Variety called it a “most satisfactory vehicle.”  The act toured the vaudeville circuit for several weeks.

From 1911 to 1913 Meyers finished in the Top 10 each year in Chalmers Award voting for the National League’s most valuable player.  In 1911 he led the Giants in batting for the first of three consecutive seasons with a .332 average, third highest in the National League.

“Meyers has become the deepest student of batting on the team,” wrote a New York Times reporter after watching him correctly predict the type of pitches thrown by Pirates phenom Marty O’Toole.

The following year Meyers hit for the cycle on June 10 en route to a career-high six home runs and a .358 average, second in the National League.  His hot hitting continued in the 1912 World Series, when he started all eight games and batted .357.  Meyers remained one of the Giants’ best hitters through the 1914 season, when he batted .286 in a career-high 134 games.

Playing in over 100 games for the sixth consecutive season, the 35-year-old Meyers batted just .232 in 1915, and the Giants placed him on waivers.  Both Brooklyn and Boston claimed him, and the Robins won his rights on a coin flip.  In Brooklyn Meyers was reunited with ex-Giants Rube Marquard, Fred Merkle, and his mentor, Wilbert Robinson, the former Baltimore Orioles catcher.

He remembered the 1916 Robins as “just outsmarting the whole National League” on their way to the pennant, but he batted just .247 in 80 games and knew that he was nearing the end.  Meyers recalled, “I cheated a little on my age so they always thought I was a few years younger but when the years started to creep up on me I knew how old I was, even if nobody else did.”

He split the 1917 season between Brooklyn and Boston, on the latter club replacing Hank Gowdy, the first active major leaguer to enlist for service in World War I, before joining the U.S. Marine Corps himself.

After receiving his discharge in 1918, Meyers joined the Buffalo Bisons, managed by his former Giants teammate Hooks Wiltse, and batted .328 in 65 games.  He started the following year as player-manager for New Haven in the Eastern League but was replaced in midseason by Danny Murphy, whom he had played against in the 1911 World Series.  Meyers was catching for a semipro team in San Diego in 1920 when the crowd booed him and he decided to quit baseball altogether.

He returned to the Riverside area and became a police chief for the Mission Indian Agency.  Meyers also worked for the Department of the Interior as an Indian supervisor.  His nephew, Jack Meyers, remembered his namesake performing “Casey at the Bat” for children’s groups around the Santa Rosa reservation. “He could be very theatrical and entertaining,” recalled his nephew.  Meyers was a favorite at old-timers games for both the Dodgers and the Giants for many years, especially after those teams moved to California.

Meyers retired with a .291 average for his nine-year career.  Overall, he played in four World Series – the 1911, 1912, and 1913 Series with the Giants, as well as the 1916 Series with the Robins.

John Meyers died on July 25, 1971, in San Bernardino, California.

A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by R. J. Lesch.  It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org

Leave a comment at the BHP web site at baseballhistorypodcast.com or write a review on iTunes, search for Baseball History Podcast.

You can email me at baseballhistory@gmail.com.

Well, that’s it for today’s Baseball History Podcast.  I’ll see you later at the ballpark.

This is game 05 of the 2012 baseball season.

In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 1 week of February.

February 7

1913 Mel Almada was born on this day in Mexico.

Baldomero Almada, nicknamed “Melo”, was born February 7, 1913 in Huatabampo, Sonora, Mexico.

He moved to southern California with his family at the age of one in 1914, amid the political and business turmoil of the Revolution in Mexico.  He made history by becoming the first Mexican baseball player to play in the Major Leagues.

Almada was a left-handed outfielder with strength and accuracy in his throws.  Though Almada lacked power, he was a line-drive hitter with an outstanding speed.  He was a respected leadoff hitter for his great ability to see a significant number of pitches and being able to successfully execute in a bunt situation at anytime in the game.
Almada was signed by the Boston Red Sox out of the Pacific Coast League on July 2, 1933.  However, Boston left Almada with Seattle for further seasoning.   He made his big-league debut on September 8, 1933.  He played center field and led off in both games of a Fenway doubleheader against Detroit, going 1-for-4 in each game.
Almada’s averages were up and down in Boston.  He batted .233 in 23 games in 1934, .290 as a regular in 1935, and .253 in 1936 (as a semi-regular, appearing in 96 games).

In 1935, Almada went to his first spring training with the big league team and came out strong.
He stuck with the big league team, missing just three games all year.  His .290 mark included three homers and 59 Runs Batted In, plus nine triples, and 20 stolen bases.

The Red Sox added Heinie Manush in 1936 and he won about the same playing time as Almada and Dusty Cooke.  Doc Cramer was the only true regular.  It was a deeper outfield, but Almada’s hitting dropped off, first in spring training — which gave Cooke an early leg up — and then again later in the season.

Manager Joe Cronin sat Almada down in September, with Jimmie Foxx taking over for some 16 games in the outfield.  The club was a bit fractious, as temperamental Wes Ferrell was fined and Billy Werber clashed with Cronin more than once.  Almada hit one homer and drove in 21.
Manush was released near the end of the 1936 season, and Cooke spent 1937 with Minneapolis. Buster Mills joined Cramer as a regular outfielder.  Alamada was beaned in an April exhibition game and suffered a concussion.  Not long after he came back, he was asked to fill in four days for Foxx at first.  Mills was not hitting well initially, so Almada took over for him for an early stretch.  Yet he still wasn’t being used as much, and became part of a large June trade with Washington.  Both Ferrell brothers were swapped to the Washington Senators, with Almada, for Ben Chapman and Buck Newsom.  Joe Cronin was happy to rid himself of Wes Ferrell, and Senators skipper Bucky Harris was glad to see the last of Newsom — and to welcome Almada.
Almada played out 1937 with the Senators and really boosted his batting: he’d been hitting .236 for Boston, but hit .309 for Washington over the final 100 games.  Though he helped the Senators snap a Yankees winning streak on July 2 with a four-hit game, his standout day was the July 25 doubleheader in St. Louis.  Almada scored four runs in the first game and five in the second; overall, he was 6-for-9 at the plate, with a home run in the first game and a double in both.
Almada was one of the few Senators to get a raise for 1938.  The euphoria didn’t last long, though.  Again starting the season slowly, Almada was hitting a soft .244.  He had particular trouble hitting left-handers.  Almada said of his slow starts, “I’ve always been a slow starter because I’m always trying to get started off on the right foot.  I guess I kinda get tense and all tied up when I’m trying to hit in that first month or six weeks and just mess everything up, but once I get started, I usually finish up pretty good.”

Though Almada’s flashy outfield work won him a strong following among the fans, Harris had given up on him as a force on offense, even disliking his batting stance.  Almost a year to the day, he was swapped again — on June 15, 1938, to St. Louis for outfielder Sam West.
The change of scenery seemed to help once more.  Almada batted .342 for the Browns, helped considerably by a 29-game hitting streak.
In 1939, for the third year in a row, Almada was moved in mid-June.  St. Louis sold him to the Brooklyn Dodgers for $25,000.  This time Almada’s average went down instead of up, from .239 to .214.  He didn’t seem to have it anymore.  It hadn’t started out that way, the Associated Press saw him as a “strong contender for the regular centerfield post” with the Dodgers.

Almada traveled north with Brooklyn out of spring training but saw no early season action.  His last at-bat in a major league uniform was a pinch-hitting appearance in the April 14 exhibition game against the Yankees in New York; he grounded into a double play.  A couple of weeks into the season, manager Leo Durocher made a decision, selling him to Rochester on April 24 when the roster was cut down.  Durocher reportedly “didn’t have the heart” to tell him, so he ducked out a side door and left it to Brooklyn’s traveling secretary to inform Almada.
Though he was still only 26 years old, Almada’s career in the majors had ended.  Despite his solid .284 lifetime average, his lack of power was his biggest drawback.  He’d driven in 197 runs but scored 363.  He always had a good arm in the outfield and racked up 47 assists.

SABR researcher Carlos Bauer asked Almada’s brother Lou why his brother’s career had ended so early.  Lou answered, “Melo couldn’t stand being thrown at.  ‘Louie,’ he once said to me, ‘They’re throwing at me because I’m a Mexican!’  ‘No, Melo,’ I told him, ‘They’re throwing at you because you’re a batter!’  ”Bauer added, “Melo, on the other hand, became obsessed with the notion that pitchers had it in for Mexicans — or him personally.
In a seven-season career, Almada posted a .284 batting average with 15 home runs and 197 Runs Batted In in 646 games.

He returned to the Pacific Coast League for one season with the Sacramento Solons in 1940. He later managed in the Mexican League. In 1972, he was inducted to the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame.
During his time with the Red Sox, the handsome young Almada had gotten some work in Hollywood.  His brother Louis had a position with Warner Bros., and Almada was cast in several movies, mostly Mexican releases for Warners and Fox.  In a December 8, 1935 press release from the American League, he explained, “They give me a small speaking part occasionally.”

Almada is still remembered in Mexico; even today its Pacific League awards the Baldomero Almada trophy to its rookie of the year.

Mel Almada died on August 13, 1988 in Caborca, Sonora, Mexico at age 75.

A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by Bill Nowlin.  It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org

Leave a comment at the BHP web site at baseballhistorypodcast.com or write a review on iTunes, search for Baseball History Podcast.

You can email me at baseballhistory@gmail.com.

Well, that’s it for today’s Baseball History Podcast.  I’ll see you later at the ballpark.

This is game 04 of the 2012 baseball season.

In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 4 week of January.

January 27

1943 The Reds trade pitcher Paul Derringer to the Cubs for cash.

Samuel Paul Derringer was born October 17, 1906 in Springfield, Kentucky.

Derringer had such command of his pitches that he was called ‘The Control King.”  He was known as a great spot pitcher able to put the ball in unhittable places.  In addition to his fastball and curve, he also from time to time mixed in a knuckle ball.
He had instant success in his rookie year in the majors but slipped a bit and then regained his form to win 223 games. He was hot tempered at times, but on the mound he exhibited great control.

Derringer started his professional baseball career in 1927 and in 1931 was in the spring training camp of the St. Louis Cardinals.  In his first assignment, according to Bob Considine, Derringer strode to the mound, his jaw grimly set with the intention of showing just how good he was.  On his very first wind-up Derringer lifted his leg so high his spikes were caught in the webbing of his glove, and when he attempted to follow through he tumbled off the mound to the delight of everyone.  But the young Derringer showed his stuff and impressed Branch Rickey so much that Rickey gave him a spot on the pitching staff and sent Dizzy Dean to the minors in order to retain Derringer.  The move was a wise one, for Derringer won 18 and lost 8 that year with a 3.36 Earned Run Average and helped the Cardinals to win the 1931 pennant.

Things deteriorated in the World Series against the A’s.  Derringer struggled and lost two games in 12-2/3 innings.  The slump continued in 1932, and he was 11-14 with the Cardinals with a 4.05 Earned Run Average.  Derringer, never a man to take things lightly, began to have skirmishes with the Cardinals front office.  This got him traded to Cincinnati on May 7 1933.

Earlier on, Derringer had almost escaped what was then called the “St. Louis Chain Gang.”  He was promised that at the end of 21 days he would get a bonus of $2,500 and a salary of $750 a month if he made good, or released if he did not make the grade.  Rickey never showed up at the end of twenty-one days and not for days after that deadline.  Enter Cy Slapnicka of the Cleveland Indians.  Slapnicka told Derringer he liked him and would sign him.  Slapnicka wrote out a bonus check for $5,000 and promised a monthly salary of $1,000.  Slapnicka told Derringer to pack his bags at night and slip out the back of the hotel where he would be waiting with his car.  Derringer slipped out all right, right into the waiting arms of coach Bill McKechnie of the Cardinals, who was having a smoke.  “Where do you think you are going?” asked McKechnie. After Derringer told McKechnie what was going on, McKechnie took Derringer to the club secretary and demanded the right to sign him and give him the promised bonus.
Like a number of good pitchers before and after him, Derringer pitched for some weak teams and absorbed more than his share of losses. F or example, he suffered through a disastrous 7-27 mark with the Cardinals and Reds in 1933 despite a 3.30 Earned Run Average that was just below the league average of 3.33.  He followed that up in 1934 by finishing 15-21 with a 3.59 Earned Run Average that was considerably better than the league average of 4.06.

The 1933 season was painful for Derringer, who took losing hard, but he was becoming very important in reviving Cincinnati aspirations toward a better future.  His 27 losses were especially frustrating, for the team rarely produced many runs for him.  In one fit of temper, he almost killed Larry MacPhail, the Cincinnati general manager.  MacPhail was reading Derringer the riot act for not sliding on a close play at home plate.  Derringer, tiring of the tongue-lashing, picked up an ink well on MacPhail’s desk and threw it at MacPhail, barely missing him.  MacPhail said, “You might have killed me, Derringer.”  Derringer replied, “That’s what I was meaning to do.”  MacPhail, never at a loss for words and actions, took out his checkbook and wrote a check to Derringer for $750 with a note that read, “Thank you for missing my head.”
To discuss Paul Derringer is to discuss two men-a pitcher with exceptional control of his pitches and general work on the mound and a man with little or no control of himself anywhere else.

His most egregious fracas occurred on June 27, 1936, at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia.  Robert Condon was at the hotel trying to get the American Legion Convention to come to New York.  In Condon’s words, “I had gone to Philadelphia at the request of Mayor LaGuardia to have the American Legion Convention come to New York the next year and was entertaining the Secretary of War and other guests and their wives in my suite.  There was a knock on the door, I opened it and this man was standing there.  He was obviously under the influence of liquor and was in his shirt-sleeves.  He wanted to know why my party was so exclusive.  I told him that it wasn’t but that he couldn’t come in.  I tried to shut the door and he hit me behind the ear and then began jumping on me.  He almost tore my clothes off and my wrist-watch was broken.  I was laid up for eight weeks and lost possible earnings of $10,000.”

Derringer denied everything.  His side of the story was that the man tried to invade his room and that he only gave him a shove to keep him from entering.  Condon had a judge issue an arrest warrant on Derringer for whenever he would come to New York.  Coincidentally, Derringer was selected to pitch in the All-Star Game in New York that year, and it was doubtful if he would show up because of the warrant.  Derringer eventually lost the case and was ordered to pay $8,000 in damages.  With the suit settled Derringer pitched in the All-Star Game.  The Reds helped Derringer by paying part of the damages, but Derringer paid the greater part but, more important, avoided prison.

From 1935 to 1940, as the Reds improved, Derringer turned in won/loss records of 22-13, 19-19, 10-14, 21-14, 25-7, and 20-13.  Becoming one of the dominant pitchers in the National League, he helped lead the Reds to league pennants in 1939 (when they were swept by the Yankees in the Series) and 1940 (when they defeated the Detroit Tigers).  Derringer won the seventh game of the 1940 World Series when he outpitched Bobo Newsom of the Tigers for a 2-1 win and the title.

Derringer was the starting pitcher in the first night game ever played in the major leagues on May 24, 1935, when the Reds hosted the Philadelphia Phillies.  Derringer won that game, 2-1.

Derringer remained with the Reds through the 1942 season until on January 27, 1943, he was sold to the Cubs.

In his final season, 1945, he went 16-11 to help the Cubs reach the World Series.  Despite the early terrible seasons, he wound up with 223 wins against 212 losses and a respectable 3.46 Earned Run Average.
In 1958 Derringer was named a founding inductee into the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame.

Paul Derringer died on November 17, 1987 in Sarasota, Florida at age 81.

A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by Ralph Berger.  It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org

Leave a comment at the BHP web site at baseballhistorypodcast.com or write a review on iTunes, search for Baseball History Podcast.

You can email me at baseballhistory@gmail.com.

Well, that’s it for today’s Baseball History Podcast.  I’ll see you later at the ballpark.

This is game 03 of the 2012 baseball season.

In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 3 week of January.

January 24

1961 The A’s trade Whitey Herzog and Russ Snyder to the Orioles for Wayne Causey, Jim Archer, Al Pilarcik and Bob Boyd.

Robert Richard Boyd, nicknamed “Rope”, was born October 1, 1919 in Potts Camp, Mississippi.

Despite his high batting average, he lacked the home run punch expected from a first baseman and was primarily a pinch hitter in his last seasons.
In 1950 he was the first black man to sign with the Chicago White Sox and among the first with any major league organization.  His career began when he was spirited out of Memphis to the White Sox’ farm club in Colorado Springs on a 12:30 a.m. flight.

He wasn’t kidnapped, but his sale did set off a family feud among three brothers named Martin, all of whom were doctors.  One, a dentist, ran the Memphis Red Sox where Boyd was playing.  Another, a physician, owned the stadium where the Red Sox played and laid claim to owning the Sox as well as a rival team.  The third, also a physician, was president of the Negro American League.

Dr. B. B. Martin, general manager of the Memphis Red Sox, made the deal with Frank Lane of the Chicago White Sox to part with Boyd for $15,000, Bobby remembered.  Dr. Martin whisked Bobby to the airport, put him on the plane for Colorado and apparently breathed easily for the first time since the contract was signed.

Boyd recalled, “They gave me $500 and put me on the plane.  The first time I ever flew.  And when I got to Colorado Springs, some white dude met me and put me up at his house.”
Then Boyd found himself at the center of a family feud.  Dr. W. S. Martin, the physician-brother who was bankrolling the Memphis team, learned of Boyd’s sale.  He immediately ordered his attorney, Charles C. Crabtree, to sue the White Sox for $35,000, alleging the team had “lured” Boyd away.  The suit was dismissed when the Martin brothers agreed to split the $15,000 sale price.

Boyd’s quest for baseball stardom started early.  Willie Boyd, Bobby’s dad, and Willie’s brother would put Bobby and his little brother Jimmy on the back of a truck to travel to baseball games where the two men played.  As Bobby came of baseball age, dad saw to it that his left-handed son was a first baseman.  Nothing else.

Baseball continued to dominate the youngster’s life even though he had no thought of playing in the major leagues.  He later said, “We just didn’t believe that was something that could happen, you know, and we accepted that.”

World War II took Bobby from home.  He went into the Quartermaster Corps and served two years.  Freed from the service in 1947, he decided to give baseball a serious try.  He “walked on” to the Memphis Red Sox, a Negro American League team, where for $175 a month he had what amounted to an unlimited bus ticket.  The team traveled and partly lived in a bus as it played both league games and a barnstorming schedule over a generous part of the eastern United States.

Boyd was in Negro baseball until 1950, never hitting under .352, playing in two East-West all-star games and leading the league in hitting in 1947.  By his final season he was earning $500 a month and selling beer in the off-season.

It was a White Sox scout, John Donaldson, who arranged for Boyd to leave Memphis.  Boyd later said, “He was traveling on the bus with us, but I didn’t know who he was or that he was watching me.  We all knew Jackie had signed, but we expected it to be a long time before any of the rest of us got to go.”

“They were very careful of who they signed,” Boyd says. “They wanted people who would get along, who wouldn’t be too bothered if there were problems.  Fortunately, I didn’t have very many.  When I played at Houston in the Texas League, I was the first black player there, but no one made much of it.

“If there was trouble anyplace, it was verbal.  Sometimes somebody at Colorado Springs or Houston or Beaumont would yell ‘nigger’ or something like that.  But usually we just played ball.”

Still, he was performing in a highly segregated society.  He went on to say, “We were barnstorming through the South with the Cardinals when I was with Chicago.  They had one black player and Minnie Minoso and I were rooming together.  While we were in the South they assigned us bodyguards.  Of course, we couldn’t stay in the hotels with the white players, so they arranged rooms for us in the homes of local people.  Those bodyguards would sit up and sleep on the front porches.  During the games they’d be in the dugouts with us.  Maybe they were the reason, but we were never bothered.”

Strangely, Bobby felt he owed his major league career to Paul Richards, the Texas-born manager he believes may have been the most prejudiced against blacks of any he encountered.

Boyd never quite made it with the White Sox, bouncing back and forth from the minors to Chicago.  Always someone like Eddie Robinson or Ferris Fain was in the way.  After Colorado Springs, Boyd hit .342 in the Pacific Coast League before playing his first dozen games with Chicago in September, 1951.  Sent back to Seattle for 1952, he hit a league-leading .320 and stole 33 bases.
But he was still stuck in the minors.  He explained, “I spent a lot more time in the minors than I thought I would or that I wanted to.”   Even in 1953, after hitting .297 for one-third of a season in Chicago, he was demoted to the minor leagues, where he languished until Richards rescued him.
Richards had been the White Sox manager and remembered Bobby’s potential when he took over at Baltimore.  He had the Orioles draft Boyd from Houston in the Texas League, where he had gone reluctantly after the Cardinals obtained him from Chicago.
“He would say a lot of things in the locker room about blacks and things like that,” Boyd remembers. “But he let me play and was helpful to me.”  Actually, figuring out that Bobby should play didn’t demand a doctorate in baseball.  In 1957, his breakout year, Boyd was fourth in American League hitting behind Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, and Gene Woodling with an average of .318.  He also was the first modern Oriole to hit over .300 for an entire season.

If Bobby lacked any physical attribute, it was height.  At 5′ 10″ he was somewhat undersized for a first baseman.  At Houston, for perhaps the only time in Boyd’s career, manager Dixie Walker openly questioned his defensive ability by telling a reporter for The Sporting News that Boyd’s shortness hurt him in stretching for throws.

But no one else was concerned, Richards in particular.  After watching him work out, he also talked with a reporter for The Sporting News, saying, “Boyd can really handle that mitt around first base.  I know he’s good enough defensively for the big leagues and he has real speed.”

The numbers all side with Richards.  As the shortest first baseman in the majors in 1957, Boyd led the league in putouts with 1,073 and his .991 was the third best fielding percentage among American League regulars.

Boyd even started a triple play at Baltimore.  According to the New York Times, with two men on, the Senators’ Eddie Fitzgerald hit a line drive down the first base line that Boyd caught.  He threw to shortstop Chico Carrasquel, who stepped on second for the second out, then threw back to Boyd, who tagged first for the third.

Boyd did play in the outfield at times, and one 1956 experiment there almost ended in disaster.  Boyd remembers fielding a hit off the bat of Cleveland’s Jim Hegan, a catcher who may have been the slowest runner in the league.  Seeing him continue to run past first, Boyd said, “I was determined he wouldn’t get to second on me,so I threw just as hard as I could.”  The throw put so much pressure on his arm that it broke, leading to two surgeries and a long recovery.

Boyd’s relatively small size also could have affected his power output.  In his best major league season, Boyd hit only seven home runs and had a total of just 19 in 1,936 major league games.  But he made up for that in part with speed.  He hit 23 triples and 81 doubles as well.

Line drive singles were the major product of Boyd’s work, the “frozen ropes” that led to his nickname.  In the book When the Cheering Stops, Boyd remembered, “Luman Harris, who was Paul Richards’ pitching coach, was the first guy who called me that.  See, I was never a long-ball hitter, but I could really hit line drives.  So one day during spring training, Harris cut off a piece of rope and put it in his pocket.  He was looking at me after I hit another line drive and he pulled the rope out and held it in the air.  ‘Rope’ was all he said to me and the nickname stuck.”

In five seasons at Baltimore, all after his 30th birthday, he responded with averages above .300 four times.  The one miss was a summer he was ill from a chronic ulcer that wasn’t cured until after he left organized baseball.

In 1960 the Orioles came up with a power-hitting first baseman, Jim Gentile, and Bobby was relegated to pinch-hit duty.  He was traded to the Kansas City A’s, who had Norm Siebern at first.  Norm was having a good year in 1961.  Boyd did not, hitting .229 in 26 games.  Then he went to Milwaukee for his only look at the National League.  There he batted .244 in 36 games.

He spent two more years trying. At Louisville and Oklahoma City in the American Association he regained his batting eye, moving above .300 again.  But he won no return call to the major leagues and retired after the 1963 season.
Boyd ended his major league career in 1961.  He compiled a .293 batting average with 19 home runs and 175 Runs Batted In.  Thanks to his discipline at the plate and knowledge of the strike zone, he registered an outstanding 1.465 walk-to-strikeout ratio.

He is a member of both the Negro League Hall of Fame and of the National Baseball Congress Hall of Fame.

Bobby Boyd died September 7, 2004 in Wichita, Kansas at age 84.

A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by Bob Rives.  It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org

Leave a comment at the BHP web site at baseballhistorypodcast.com or write a review on iTunes, search for Baseball History Podcast.

You can email me at baseballhistory@gmail.com.

Well, that’s it for today’s Baseball History Podcast.  I’ll see you later at the ballpark.

This is game 02 of the 2012 baseball season.

In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 2 week of January.

January 14

1970 After seeing his upstart team win the World Series last season, Mets general manager Johnny Murphy dies of a heat attack. Murphy was a top relief pitcher for the Yankees in the 1930′s and early 40′s.

John Joseph Murphy was born July 14, 1908 in New York City.

A righthanded, curveballing control pitcher, Murphy began his career as a starter with the Yankees, starting 20 games as a rookie in 1934.  After being switched to the bullpen the following season, he started only 20 more games in his 13-year career.

After attending Fordham University in his native New York City, Murphy signed a professional contract with the New York Yankees in 1929.
He debuted in the major leagues on May 19, 1932 finishing up a 12-7 loss to the Washington Senators.  He pitched once more before the Yankees sent him to the International League’s Newark Bears.  When the Yankees voted on how to distribute their World Series shares—that being the year of Ruth’s “Called Shot” and a sweep of the Cubs—Murphy was voted $500.  He’d earn a larger chunk of the pie later.

After another year in Newark, Murphy came north again with the Yankees in 1934.  This time he never went back.  Murphy started 20 games for New York—completing 10—but tossed another 20 in relief and going 14-10 with a 3.12 Earned Run Average.  He made only 20 more starts the rest of his career and he never again approached the 207.7 innings he had as a rookie.

Manager Joe McCarthy’s decision to put Murphy in the bullpen paid dividends for the finesse pitcher and his club.  At the time, relievers were usually pitchers who were past their prime or deemed not good enough to start; if teams needed a reliever at a crucial point late in a game, they often turned to starters who were in between starts.  Though Yankees starters still completed the majority of their games, McCarthy utilized the young pitcher’s masterful curveball out of the pen in tight situations.  Murphy’s reliability to finish close games earned him the trust of his manager and teammates.  When perennial All-Star Lefty Gomez was asked to predict how many games he would win one season, the wry pinstriper retorted, “Ask Murphy.”

The save was years away from becoming an official statistic, but applying it retroactively, Murphy led the American League in that category four times in five seasons.
Murphy made the All-Star team three consecutive years from 1937 to 1939.  His postseason numbers totaled a 2-0 record, 1.10 Earned Run Average, and four saves in eight games.  In four separate World Series, Murphy allowed no runs.  He pitched once in each World Series from 1936 to 1939, earning three saves and a win.

His best season was 1941 where he posted an 8-3 mark, 1.98 Earned Run Average, and 15 saves.  On October 5 that year, Murphy entered Game Four of the World Series in Brooklyn in the eighth inning.  Murphy wound up getting the win after Dodgers catcher Mickey Owen’s missed third strike set the stage for a four-run Yankees ninth.  He set down all six Dodgers he faced.  He threw six scoreless innings overall in 1941 as the Yankees won in five games.

The most popular nickname attached to Murphy was “Grandma.”  Many tales attribute the moniker to his rocking motion on the hill.  A more plausible explanation is given by A Legend in the Making author Richard Tofel.  Tofel claimed “Grandma” came from 1935-37 Yankees teammate Pat Malone, who had tired of Murphy’s “incessant complaining about meals and accommodations.”
Murphy voluntarily left baseball in 1944, during World War II to work on a special defense project.  On March 7, 1946, fans read that he was re-upping with the Yankees.  The Washington Post reported, “Baseball’s Bronx Bombers will have an atomic specialist in their ranks this year…Johnny Murphy had come to terms…on the retired list the past two seasons while he worked on the atomic bomb project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”
Murphy had one more solid season, garnering a 4-2 mark with a 3.40 Earned Run Average and seven saves.  The Yankees failed to win the pennant for the third straight year and McCarthy was replaced by Bucky Harris and Murphy’s role—and nickname—of “Fireman” was taken over on the Yankees by Joe Page.  Three days after Murphy’s release, the Red Sox signed him on April 15, 1947.

He pitched 54.7 innings and had a 2.80 Earned Run Average for the defending American League champion Red Sox.  Murphy had three saves and finished games in 16 of his 32 appearances. That gave him a career mark of 93-53 in 293 games with a 3.50 Earned Run Average and 107 unofficial saves in 1,045 innings.  Though Boston released him on October 20, 1947.

With his playing days ended, Murphy stepped immediately into the Boston front office when owner Tom Yawkey appointed him Director of Minor League Operations.  Murphy spent 13 seasons running the Red Sox’ farm and scouting systems until his dismissal following the 1960 season.

In 1961, he joined former Yankees farm director and general manager George Weiss in the front office of New York’s National League expansion team, the New York Mets.
Murphy handled the negotiations that wound up changing the future of the franchise.  He was sent to Washington to try to bring back Gil Hodges to manage the Mets.  The Senators had him under a long-term contract and weren’t presupposed to let him go, but Mets board chairman M. Donald Grant was adamant that Hodges manage the Mets.  Murphy had been a teammate and one-time roommate of Senators General Manager George Selkirk and the two old friends eventually worked out the deal: pitcher Bill Denehey and $100,000 for the Hodges.  The Mets had a manager but soon lost their general manager when Bing Devine left the Mets to take the same post in his native St. Louis.  On December 27, 1967, Johnny Murphy was named the third general manager in Mets history.

At spring training in 1968, the former Yankees fireman and the long-time Brooklyn first baseman made Mets activities uniform and established priorities.  Practice sessions were regimented.  The team ceased repeatedly rotating players between the farm system and the parent club.  General Manager Murphy worked closely with director of player development Whitey Herzog.  The main objective was pitching…something the Mets happened to have a bumper crop of in 1968.
The 1969 Miracle Mets pitching staff, a significant key to the pennant and World Series was primarily comprised of club developed talent, namely Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Gary Gentry, Nolan Ryan, Jim McAndrew, and Tug McGraw.  The team needed hitting, an area the 1969 Mets did not excel in outside of homegrown Cleon Jones and his .340 average, but Murphy grabbed young third baseman Wayne Garrett from the Braves in the Rule V draft and when the Mets were surprisingly in contention in June, he acquired veteran slugger Donn Clendenon from Montreal.  The Miracle Mets went on to win the World Series.

Johnny Murphy died on January 14, 1970 in Yonkers, New York at age 61.

The Mets still honor their former General Manager by annually handing out the Johnny Murphy Award to the top rookie in spring training, a tradition that dates to 1972.

The Mets inducted Murphy into the team’s Hall of Fame in 1983.

A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by John Vorperian.  It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org

Leave a comment at the BHP web site at baseballhistorypodcast.com or write a review on iTunes, search for Baseball History Podcast.

You can email me at baseballhistory@gmail.com.

Well, that’s it for today’s Baseball History Podcast.  I’ll see you later at the ballpark.

This is game 01 of the 2012 baseball season.

In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 1 week of January.

January 7

1924 The Indians trade catcher Steve O’Neill, second baseman Bill Wambsganns and pitcher Danny Boone to the Red Sox for first baseman George Burns, second baseman Chick Fewster and catcher Al Walters.

Wilson Lloyd Fewster, nicknamed “Chick”, was born November 10, 1895 in Baltimore, MD.

Fewster broke into organized baseball in 1915 playing second base, and then in 1917 was brought up to the Yankees in time to debut on September 19.  In 11 late-season games, he hit .222, driving in just one run and scoring twice.
In 1918, he was with the Yankees throughout the season but used only sparingly in five games, going one for two at the plate.

He hit .283 in 1919, collecting his first home run and scoring 38 times while driving in 15 runs.  He played 41 games in the outfield and divided his other work in the field between shortstop, second base, and third base – though he committed 12 errors in 245 games at short.
Just five months before Cleveland’s Ray Chapman was hit on the head and killed by a pitch, Fewster had his own brush with death.   It was during spring training, in March of 1920.  Manager Miller Huggins had recently raved about Fewster, “Chick has everything.  I have never seen a greater prospect.”

The Yankees were hosting the Brooklyn Robins in Jacksonville in a March 25 exhibition game.  Two players had been hurt before the game, during batting practice.  Both Wally Pipp of the Yanks and Clarence Mitchell of the Brooklyns had been knocked out, by a thrown ball to first base in Pipp’s case and a batted ball from a teammate in Mitchell’s.  It was already a rough day.

Carl Mays was pitching for the Yankees, and retired Brooklyn in the top of the first.  Fewster, playing third base, was the leadoff batter in the bottom of the first, facing Big Jeff Pfeffer.  With the count 2-1, Pfeffer’s fourth pitch struck Fewster on the temple.  The New York Times reported, “The impact sounded like a cocoanut shell cracking and Fewster went down like an ox felled by an axe.  He was on the ground unconscious for about ten minutes before Trainer Woods and a bunch of assistants could bring him.”  There was immediate worry that he might become gun-shy in future at-bats.

A day later, it was clear that he’d been much more seriously injured than first thought.  He lost his power of speech at first and it was clear that the bruising was far deeper than it had seemed.  The Sporting News said that his “life hung in the balance for about three days” with a fractured skull and a concussion.  A doctor accompanied him as he was moved to Union Protestant Infirmary in Baltimore, and three days later doctors said he was slowly recovering his speech.  It was six days later before it was fully determined that his skull had indeed been fractured and he was bleeding from a hemorrhage.  He underwent an operation at Johns Hopkins Hospital on March 31 to remove a piece of his skull about the size of a silver dollar and remove a blood clot at the same time.  A silver plate was placed in his skull.  A report from the Washington Post, April 2, 1920 was headlined, “Fewster Not Likely to Play Ball Again.”

Recuperation progressed more rapidly than expected, and by April 9 he was able to sit up in bed and speak with some degree of coherency.  By April 17 he was reported to be “feeling so well now that he is anxious to get out and play ball again.”
His optimism was not just hollow hope.  He rejoined the team and got into his first games on July 5, playing both halves of a doubleheader in Washington.  He was hit by a pitch the very next day but hung in there.  The Yankees had had a special batting helmet made for him, but he declined to wear it.

He saw action in 21 games before the end of the season, with 29 plate appearances.  He hit for a .286 average and scored eight runs, though only driving in one.  He was walked seven times, perhaps an indication that pitchers were hesitant to pitch too closely to him.

The year after his injury, Fewster hit a steady .280 in 1921, covering center field much more than any other position, until Elmer Miller took over most of the duties in early August.  He appeared in the World Series, taking over for Babe Ruth late in Game Three after Ruth wrenched his knee.  Fewster played in four games, with a two-run homer in Game Six.  In 13 plate appearances, he got two hits and walked three times.  The Giants won the best-of-nine World Series, five games to three.

Fewster was sent from New York to Boston on July 22, 1922 in a big trade.  Miller joined him, as did Lefty O’Doul, Johnny Mitchell, and $50,000.  In exchange, Harry Frazee sent the Yankees Jumpin’ Joe Dugan and Elmer Smith.  They became the eleventh and twelfth Red Sox players traded or sold to New York, and the Yankees ballclub was now largely made up of former Red Sox players.  Fewster had been hitting .242 for New York through 44 games, his one home run a game-winning inside-the-park grand slam on May 12.

It was the loss of Dugan that upset Boston fans the most.  The Boston Herald called it a “disgusting trade” and even charged that Miller, Mitchell, and Fewster were all “tossed in to Boston for camouflage purposes.”  Frazee said he thought the trade would strengthen his team, adding for emphasis, “I wish I had six more players with the ‘guts’ and fight of Chick Fewster.”

About a year later, the Washington Post noted that after Fewster’s recovery, “instead of showing timidity at the bat, he seemed over daring and the pitchers were almost afraid of him.  His heart surely was there, and his courage never had been weakened, but the injury left him physically weak and he was unable to play in hot weather” due to dizzy spells when the sun beat down on him.
Boston had a new manager in the spring of 1923 and Boston Globe sportswriter Mel Webb said that Fewster was “the most aggressive player Frank Chance has in his baseball caravan.”

He showed some spunk on the bench, too, trading punches with teammate Val Picinich on the bench during the fifth inning of the July 27 home game in an argument over a throw from catcher Picinich.  On August 9, Fewster wrenched his back so badly chasing down a fly ball that he had to be carried from the field.  He was out for two weeks.  His 90 games in 1923 was his most to date, but his average fell to .236.

Early in January 1924, Fewster was traded to the Indians. played two years in Cleveland, appearing in 101 and 93 games respectively, hitting .267 in 1924 and .248 in 1925.  Manager Tris Speaker told him that the second base job was his for 1925, and he played more there than anyone else, but was still limited to just 83 games at second and 10 at third.

In another January deal, he was sold to Brooklyn in 1926.  It wasn’t quite that straightforward, however; the Indians had outrighted him to Kansas City over the winter, but he said he would refuse to report.  So something was worked out and Kansas City sold him to Brooklyn on April 8.

At first, it again looked like he might have landed a regular job at second base, though he didn’t play quite as much as the season progressed.  Nonetheless, he reached a career-high with 105 games, hitting for a .243 average.

Fewster is perhaps best known for being a part of one of the most famous flubs in baseball history, the “three men on third” incident that occurred during the 1926 season.  Fewster was on first and future Hall of Famer Dazzy Vance was on second when teammate Babe Herman hit a long ball and began racing around the bases.  As Herman rounded second, the third base coach yelled at him to go back, since Fewster had not yet passed third.  Vance, having rounded third, misunderstood and thought the instructions to reverse course were for him.  Thus, Vance returned to third at the same time Fewster arrived there.  Meanwhile, Herman ignored the instruction to go back and also arrived at third at the same time.  The third baseman tagged out Herman and Fewster; Vance was declared safe by rule.

The Robins brought him back in 1927, but only in pinch roles and not for long.  He appeared only four times before he was outrighted to Jersey City of the International League on May 5.
He spent the next two seasons in the minor leagues before retiring from baseball.  On October 10, 1929 he announced his retirement to enter the brokerage business.  It wasn’t good timing; on October 25, the stock market collapsed as “Black Friday” kicked off the Great Depression.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, he joined the Merchant Marine at the age of 46 and participated in the supplying for the African invasion, even surviving the sinking of his ship in the Persian Gulf on one trip.

Chick Fewster died on April 16, 1945, in Baltimore, MD; he was only 49 years old.

A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by Bill Nowlin.  It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org

Leave a comment at the BHP web site at baseballhistorypodcast.com or write a review on iTunes, search for Baseball History Podcast.

You can email me at baseballhistory@gmail.com.

Well, that’s it for today’s Baseball History Podcast.  I’ll see you later at the ballpark.

This is game 52 of the 2011 baseball season.

In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 4 week of December.

December 31

1931 Milt Gaston changes the color of his socks as Boston trades the forkballer to Chicago in exchange for southpaw slinger, Bob Weiland (2-7, 5.16).

Robert George Weiland was born December 14, 1905 in Chicago, Illinois.

Left-handed pitcher Weiland’s record is a reminder that the team you play for can have as much as anything to do with your won-loss totals.  It was his misfortune to play for the worst two teams in the American League for the first six and a half years in the majors putting up a combined record of 20-50.  Near the end of his career, he was fortunate to enjoy three full seasons with the “Gas House Gang” St. Louis Cardinals, with much better results.

Weiland grew to become rather tall for the times, 6-feet-4, and had a major-league playing weight of 210.   As a southpaw, it didn’t take long for him to acquire the predictable nickname of “Lefty.”

At age 20, in 1926, he signed with the Peoria Tractors of the Three-I League (Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League), a Class B team for which he never played.  His first year in organized baseball was in the Class D Mississippi Valley League with the Moline Plowboys.  He was 10-8 in 187 innings of work during the 1927 season, improving to 20-10 in 1928 with a reported league-record 210 strikeouts.

He was purchased by his hometown Chicago White Sox on July 23 for $3,000 and earned a September call-up.  He appeared in just one game for his hometown Chicago White Sox, on September 30, and shut out the Philadelphia Athletics, 1-0, allowing seven hits and walking five while striking out nine.

In 1929, he was up and down between the White Sox and the Toledo Mud Hens, posting a 2-4 won/loss record with Chicago and 3-4 record with Toledo.

In 1930, he pitched for three teams, but never did win a game: 0-1 for the Mud Hens, 0-1 for the Buffalo Bisons, and 0-4 for the White Sox.

In 1931, Weiland pitched to an 11-8 season for the Louisville Colonels.  He was 2-7 for the White Sox, with a 5.16 Earned Run Average, and was traded to the Red Sox on December 2nd. He’d been 5-15 for Chicago with an earned run average of 5.39 over the parts of four seasons.  The White Sox had finished seventh, seventh, and eighth his last three years.

Joining the Red Sox might not have seemed to offer any brighter hopes of finishing in the money.  Boston had placed eighth, eighth, and sixth.  If there was a trend, though, it may have seemed it was towards improvement.  The Red Sox finished eighth again in 1932, however, and Weiland’s 6-16 won/loss record led the team in losses.  His earned run average of 5.39 over the parts of four seasons.  The White Sox had finished seventh, seventh, and of 4.51 was distinctly better than the team’s own 5.02.  He did have trouble throwing the ball over the plate, walking 97 while only striking out 63.

Weiland improved his second year with the Red Sox, and finished 8-14 with a 3.87 earned run average with 97 strikeouts but an even 100 walks.  The team finished seventh.

He started with a 1-5 record for the Red Sox in 1934, but then was traded to the Cleveland Indians in May.  It was a good deal for Boston.  They sent Weiland and Bob Seeds and $25,000 of new owner Tom Yawkey’s money to Cleveland for Wes Ferrell and Dick Porter.  For the Indians, he pitched better but also put up a 1-5 record for them, making it 2-10 on the season.  That November, he was sent to the St. Louis Browns.

He didn’t pitch much for the Browns, and was 0-2 with 31 bases on balls in 32 innings.  His earned run average of 9.56 left a great deal to be desired.  Most of the year he spent in the minor leagues, and after manager Rogers Hornsby released him on option to Albany on June 14, he was a 9-10 combined with Albany and Rochester, which acquired him in a deal with the Browns.

Weiland saw no big-league duty in 1936, but had a very successful full season with the Rochester Red Wings.  His won/loss record was 23-13 and he lead the International League with 171 strikeouts.  This earned him another shot with the major leagues.

He signed with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1937 and put together back-to-back winning seasons, 15-14 and 16-11.  Playing with a better team certainly helped, but his earned run average was down dramatically, too.  He did seem to have found himself again.  In 1939, when the Cards reached second place, though, Weiland slipped some, to 10-12 – though his earned run average was almost identical to the two previous years.

On April 26, 1940, he pitched his final time in the major leagues.  It was the only inning he pitched that year, only two-thirds of an inning.  He allowed three earned runs before being removed from the game.  He was released outright, sold to the Pacific Coast League’s Los Angeles Angels on May 10, and was 12-7 in 1940.

He was 1-4 with the Angels in 1941 but was sold to the Milwaukee Brewers where he was 0-2 in American Association play.  Weiland requested his release and, as a ten-year man, was granted it.

Bob Weiland died on November 9, 1988, in Chicago, IL.

A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by Bill Nowlin.  It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org

Leave a comment at the BHP web site at baseballhistorypodcast.com or write a review on iTunes, search for Baseball History Podcast.

You can email me at baseballhistory@gmail.com.

Well, that’s it for today’s Baseball History Podcast.  I’ll see you later at the ballpark.

This is game 51 of the 2011 baseball season.

In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 4 week of December.

December 26

1935 Al Jackson, a member of the inaugural 1962 New York Mets, was born today.

Alvin Neill Jackson, nicknamed “Little Al”, was born December 25, 1935 in Waco, Texas.

Jackson was a gutty left-handed pitcher that Reds outfielder Vada Pinson described as “Very competitive, small, big heart – he knew how to pitch.  He fought you every kind of way to help beat you.”

Jackson was a ballplayer with an uncanny knack for being on teams that reached October around him but never with him square in the middle of the hoopla.  He appeared as a Pittsburgh Pirate in 1959 and 1961, but managed to miss 1960, the year of Bill Mazeroski’s World Series heroics.  He was in Cincinnati as the gears of the Big Red Machine were tightened for the dynasty that lay ahead but was released one week into Cincy’s 1970 pennant romp.  He was a part of the 1967 world champion Cardinals, going 9-4 starting and relieving, but of the 10 pitchers none of them was named Al Jackson.

So it was that the 1969 Mets, remembered for pitchers like Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Nolan Ryan, and Tug McGraw, rendered Al Jackson’s participation in baseball’s miracle of miracles into a footnote.  The Mets, needing to clear roster space sold Jackson to the Reds on June 13.  The deal severed the last active link the Mets would ever have to their most humble beginnings.

As a footnote, keep in mind that Ed Kranepool was a ’69 Met.  However, he was a late arriver to the 1962 team, receiving a few token at-bats at the Polo Grounds after being signed out of high school earlier in the year.

Whatever sentimentality might have lingered over the transaction was ultimately obscured by Jackson’s undistinguished 1969 Mets line: no decisions; 13 earned runs allowed over 11 innings; the team’s record a most unmiraculous 1-8 when Al Jackson took the mound.

Jackson’s final outing as a 1969 Met, on May 22, was straight out of 1962: with the Braves up 10-0, he replaced Cal Koonce to pitch the bottom of the seventh at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.  With a runner on first when he entered, Jackson surrendered a single, a walk, a sacrifice fly, a fielder’s choice, a run batted in, single, and a two-run double.  When he gave way, the Mets trailed 14-0.  The loss lowered the Mets’ record to 18-19, noteworthy in Mets lore because it dropped the Mets below .500 one night after the players claimed to disbelieving reporters that they didn’t consider a break-even mark any kind of milestone, that they had loftier goals in their immediate sights.

The Mets would sag to 18-23 before forever burying the ghosts of 1962 by reeling off 11 consecutive wins.  But by then, Al Jackson was all but bound for Cincinnati, relegated to the role of observer of a miracle as much as any Original Met.

The thickest of ironies here is Al Jackson, one of the least consequential Mets of 1969, was perhaps the 1962 Met who soared the highest above his team’s sorry morass.  Granted, no individual on a team that accumulated 120 losses could be said to stand completely apart from the muck of historic futility, but Jackson, despite his surroundings, showed honest promise and progress to the fans who populated the Polo Grounds at its end and Shea Stadium at its beginnings.

Jackson attended Wiley College in Marshall, Texas prior to signing with Pittsburgh in 1955.  He led the Western League in 1958 with a 2.07 Earned Run Average while winning 18 and logging 230 innings in Lincoln, Nebraska, and followed that with a 15-4 season in Columbus that ended with Jackson in the big leagues for the first time.  Yet the Pirates bypassed him in their championship year of 1960 and, after only three appearances in ’61, exposed him to the National League expansion draft.  Jackson was chosen by the Mets and started the third game ever in the franchise’s existence.  It was a loss.

Al Jackson was not alone among Mets pitchers in defeat.  The 1962 Mets lost their first nine games, but Jackson would do what he could to turn things around, no matter how much like spitting into the ocean those efforts amounted to.  He notched the club’s first shutout, in the opener of a doubleheader against Philadelphia on April 29.  His second shutout, over fellow National League newcomers, the Houston Colt .45s, represented the Mets’ first-ever one-hitter, the only Colt hit coming off the bat of Joey Amalfitano in the first.

On those 40-120 freshman Mets, Al Jackson threw a team-leading four shutouts—their only four shutouts in 1962.  All of them, strangely enough, were pitched in the first games of doubleheaders.  It was enough to earn him recognition on the Topps 1962 All-Rookie team.
Nevertheless, the most famous game those 1962 Mets played, also a twin bill opener, may tell Al Jackson’s story of being a bit of a bystander to history.  It was Sunday, June 17, 1962, Father’s Day against the Cubs at the Polo Grounds.  Jackson started and fell behind 4-0 immediately in a top of the first, capped by Lou Brock’s two-run homer into the distant center-field bleachers and set up when first baseman Marv Throneberry didn’t execute a rundown.  His teammates, in a rare display of timely support for one of its pitchers, came to his rescue…in their unique way.

With one run in and two runners on, Throneberry hit what everybody at the Polo Grounds assumed was a triple.  Except “Marvelous Marv” neglected to touch various combinations of first and second bases. Though the two runners scored, Throneberry was ruled out on appeal. J immy Breslin in Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? chiseled what happened next into Mets mythology, reporting that after Charlie Neal homered, Stengel bolted from the dugout to point to each base to make sure every bag was touched.

Little remarked upon in that comedy of errors that exemplified the 1962 Mets was that Al Jackson acquitted himself pretty well the rest of the day, pitching into the ninth and giving up only an Ernie Banks home run in the third and a Brock Run Batted In double in the eighth and allowing the Mets a chance to come back on the Cubs.  Naturally for Jackson and those beleaguered Mets, Throneberry struck out as the potential winning run with two out in the bottom of the ninth; they lost the nightcap by a run as well.

With outings like those too often the norm and a final record that reflected that reality at 8 wins and 20 losses, not even the most losses among Mets starters; Roger Craig suffered 24 Losses’s.

Jackson shone as the best of a the lot on those first Mets staffs.  Nobody struck out more hitters in the Mets’ first four grisly campaigns; nobody posted more victories in a single season than the 13 he put up in 1963 for a 51-111 outfit.  He earned Opening Day starts in 1964 and 1965; and the 10 shutouts he pitched between 1962 and 1965 are still good for sixth all-time on the all-time Mets career list.
It’s little wonder that as the Mets moved into Shea Stadium in 1964, Jackson stood tallest on a roster that was otherwise easily overlooked.  The Sporting News hailed him as the likeliest candidate to become “Shea Stadium’s first 20-game winner,” a proposition that seemed that much more realistic on April 19 when Jackson’s 6-0 whitewashing of the Pirates went down as the club’s first win in their new home.  “I thought it was heaven,” Jackson said of Shea Stadium in Newsday in 2008, particularly in comparison to the doomed Polo Grounds.

It was the left-hander’s final start of 1964, however, that remains his signature Mets moment.  With the Cardinals trying to take advantage of the Phillies’ epic collapse, St. Louis saw the National League flag as theirs for the taking by because of the schedule maker’s kindness: the Cardinals final three games came at home against the 51 win and108 loss Mets…and they had ace Bob Gibson going against the cellar dwellers.

But the Mets had Al Jackson going against the first-place Cardinals and on Friday, October 2, Jackson got the best of Gibson, beating the future Hall of Famer, 1-0 when he scattered five hits and clinched the best-ever win total by the franchise to date.  One might also argue that beating a team like St. Louis in such a situation might have been the franchise’s best-ever win to date, but that point is moot because the next day they beat the Cardinals again.  The Cards, with Gibson coming out of the bullpen on one day’s rest, righted the ship on Sunday by coming from behind to finally defeat the Mets and win their first pennant since 1946.

In 2008, Jackson recalled for Newsday the Cardinals’ reception for him as he walked through their clubhouse on that last Friday night to appear on Harry Caray’s postgame show.  “Oh, did they call me a bunch of names.  They said, ‘You guys are 59 games out of first place and you’ve got to pitch a game like this?’  Man, did they rip me.”

The 10th-place Mets actually trailed the first place Cardinals by only 41 games entering play on October 2, but the stakes were too high for statistical niceties in St. Louis.
Though the home team lineup on October 3, 1965 included 1969 mainstays Ron Swoboda, Bud Harrelson, and Ed Kranepool—to Jackson, it had to look like the same old same old.  He lost the first game of a season-ending doubleheader to the Phillies, 3-1, leaving his bottom line for 1965 at 8-20…identical to the 8-20 of 1962.  His respective Earned Run Averages of 4.40 in 1962 and 4.34 in 1965 were eerily similar, too, while the team’s record of 50 wins and 112 losses was their worst since their first.

Jackson remains the only Met to ever lose 20 games in a season more than once, but he was certainly not alone in piling up the losses; in both 1962 and ’1965 Jackson wasn’t even the team leader in that category; Roger Craig and Jack Fisher, respectively, each lost 24.

In the 1965 offseason, Jackson was granted a professional reprieve and traded to the Cardinals.  In 1967, Jackson was part of team that glided to a National League championship but, despite going 9-4 as a spot starter, he wasn’t considered enough of an essential ingredient by the Cardinals to be used in the World Series or retained for their repeat run in 1968.  The Sporting News lumped him in among the “dead wood” St. Louis cleared away after winning the World Series without him.

Jackson returned to the Mets as payment for reliever Jack Lamabe the day after the 1967 Series ended.  Though fellow Original Met Gil Hodges was back in New York to manage the 1968 club, the Polo Grounds reunion in Queens didn’t result in a renaissance for Jackson, who pitched only 25 times for his old teammate and new skipper.  His appearance in the Opening Day slugfest against the brand-new Montreal Expos on April 8, 1969, wherein he surrendered an immediate home run to Rusty Staub and allowed two more baserunners who would score, did not augur well for Jackson’s longevity in his encore Mets tenure.

In June, Jackson was traded to the Cincinnati Reds.  Jackson’s body of yeoman work as a New York Met netted him no better than a record of 43 wins and 80 losses.  When he was not a Met he had a very respectable 24 and 19 won/loss record.  When he was a Met between 1962 and 1965, Jackson’s team’s winning percentage was .300.
Since retiring as a player, Jackson has served as pitching coach with the Boston Red Sox and Baltimore Orioles but otherwise has instructed Mets pitchers on an ongoing basis these past few decades.

Ron Darling credited Jackson, then pitching coach under Davey Johnson at Triple-A Tidewater, with staying on him relentlessly in 1982 and designing special workouts to prepare the 22-year-old pitcher to make the final step to the major leagues.  Darling wrote in The Complete Game. “I was young and single, living on the beach in Norfolk, Virginia.  I was content but Al kept on me.  He’d say, ‘What do you have to be content about?  You haven’t done anything.  You haven’t struggled.’”

Darling said of Jackson’s pitching philosophy, “According to Al, starting the game is a process, but once the game begins there’s no easing into it. It’s full-on, right from the first pitch.”

A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by Greg W. Prince.  It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org

Leave a comment at the BHP web site at baseballhistorypodcast.com or write a review on iTunes, search for Baseball History Podcast.

You can email me at baseballhistory@gmail.com.

Well, that’s it for today’s Baseball History Podcast.  I’ll see you later at the ballpark.

This is game 50 of the 2011 baseball season.

In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 2 week of December.

December 14

1948 The Senators trade pitcher Early Wynn and first baseman Mickey Vernon to the Indians for first baseman Eddie Robinson and pitchers Joe Hayness and Eddie Klieman.

Early Wynn Jr., nicknamed “Gus”, was born January 6, 1920, Hartford, Alabama

He was a burly, hard-nosed competitor, who treated every ballgame as if it were a war.  His durability helped him lead the American League in innings three times and also helped him last 23 seasons.

At age 17 Wynn traveled to Sanford, Florida, to attend a baseball camp operated by the Washington Senators.  Legend has it that Wynn, a husky six-footer who weighed about 200 pounds, arrived at camp in his bare feet.  He didn’t, but years later said to writer Roger Kahn, “but I was wearing coveralls.”  A Washington scout was impressed with his fastball and signed Wynn to a contract.  The young pitcher dropped out of high school and began his professional career in 1937 with the Senators.
The Senators gave him a trial in Washington at the end of the 1939 season, though Wynn was not yet ready for major-league action, going 0-2 in three games.  He spent the next two years in the minor leagues.  In 1942 he made 28 starts for the Senators, posting a 10-16 mark with a 5.12 Earned Run Average as a 22-year-old with little more than a fastball in his arsenal.

In 1939 Wynn married and the couple had a son named.  Tragically, the marriage ended prematurely.  In December of 1942, Wynn’s wife was killed in an automobile accident.  Wynn was left with a baby to raise, with the assistance of his relatives.

He won 18 games for Washington in 1943, but fell to 8-17 in 1944, leading the American League in losses.  He married again that September, shortly after entering the United States Army.  Wynn served in the Tank Corps in the Philippines, spending all of the 1945 season and part of the next in the military before rejoining the Senators.

At this time, Wynn owned an impressive fastball, but had only a mediocre changeup to complement it.  He was inconsistent, posting a 17-15 record in 1947 and an 8-19 mark in 1948.  Still, he was undeniably talented, and the Cleveland Indians coveted his services.  Bill Veeck, the Cleveland team owner, tried to acquire Wynn in a trade before the 1948 season, but was rebuffed by Washington owner Clark Griffith.  In November 1948, Veeck acquired pitcher Joe Haynes, Griffith’s son-in-law, from the Chicago White Sox.  Veeck then offered Haynes to the Senators for Wynn, and Griffith agreed, sending first baseman Mickey Vernon along with Wynn for Haynes, pitcher Ed Klieman, and first baseman Eddie Robinson.

The Indians figured that Wynn would become a big winner if he could develop more pitches, and the club assigned pitching coach Mel Harder to teach him how to throw a curve and a slider.  Wynn recalled years later in The Sporting News, “I could throw the ball when I came here [to Cleveland], but Mel made a pitcher out of me.”  By mid-1949 he had mastered the curve and slider, and began to use a knuckleball as an off-speed delivery.  With a new array of pitches at his command, Wynn joined the ranks of top hurlers in 1950.  He won 18 games and led the American League in earned-run average that season with a 3.20 mark.

Wynn got along well with his teammates, but was a grim, scowling presence on the mound.  He told sportswriter Red Smith, “That space between the white lines — that’s my office, that’s where I conduct my business.  You take a look at the batter’s box, and part of it belongs to the hitter.  But when he crowds in just that hair, he’s stepping into my office, and nobody comes into my office without an invitation when I’m going to work.”  With his large frame, grizzled appearance, and willingness to knock down opposing hitters, Wynn stood out as one of the most intimidating pitchers in the game.

He hated losing, and was never afraid to throw at batters who got too close to the plate, or hit line drives at him.  Some called him a headhunter, but Wynn regarded close pitches as part of the game.  Wynn said in an article he wrote for Sport magazine in 1956, “If they are going to outlaw the inside pitch they ought to eliminate line drives and sharp grounders hit through the pitcher’s box.”  To those who suggested that he would throw at his own mother, Wynn famously replied, “I would if she were crowding the plate.”

One day, Mickey Mantle drilled a liner through the box for a single.  Wynn then threw several pickoff attempts at Mantle’s legs.  He told rookie pitcher Gary Bell, “You’ll never be a big winner until you start hating the hitter.  That guy with the bat is trying to take away your bread and butter. You’ve got to fight him every second.”

His toughness and durability made Wynn part of one of the greatest pitching rotations of all time in Cleveland, with Wynn, Bob Lemon, Bob Feller, and Mike Garcia all posting 20-win seasons during the early 1950s.  Under the tutelage of Mel Harder and manager Al Lopez, Wynn won 20 games or more in a season four times for Cleveland, and anchored the rotation that led the Indians to the American League pennant in 1954.  In the World Series that year, the New York Giants defeated Wynn in the second game, as he gave up three runs in seven innings and lost by a 3-1 score.  Wynn did not have the chance to pitch again in the Series, as the Giants swept to the title in four games.
Beginning in 1955, Wynn produced a regular column for the Cleveland News, titled “The Wynn Mill,” and donated the money he earned from the effort to the Elks Club in his hometown.  Though he had dropped out of high school, Wynn wrote without the assistance of a ghostwriter, and his frank assessments of umpires, league policies, and his own management rankled Cleveland team officials and strained his relationship with general manager Hank Greenberg.

Wynn notched another 20-win campaign in 1956, but in 1957 he posted his first losing season in Cleveland with a won/loss record of 14-17, despite leading the league in strikeouts.  The careers of both Bob Feller and Bob Lemon drew to a close during this time, and perhaps the Indians believed that the 37-year-old Wynn was fading as well.

On December 4, 1957, the team traded Wynn and outfielder Al Smith to the Chicago White Sox for outfielder Minnie Minoso and infielder Fred Hatfield.  The White Sox inserted a clause in his contract that prohibited the pitcher from writing for newspapers, but the team compensated him for the lost income.  Reunited with his old Cleveland manager Al Lopez, who had been released by the Indians and hired by the White Sox, Wynn compiled a 14-16 record in 1958, leading the league in strikeouts again.

He was still a tough competitor, sometimes throwing chairs in the locker room after losses.  Wynn hated to be taken out of games, though his advancing age often made it necessary to use relievers to finish his wins.  In 1992, Al Lopez described Wynn’s competitiveness to biographer Wes Singletary.  “So this one day Early was arguing with the umpire, when I came out there and he threw the ball at me, hitting me in the stomach.  It was more of a flip/toss but the press played it up.  I said give me the goddamned ball and don’t be throwing it at me.  After the game he came and apologized to me.  I said, Early, I know how you feel but the people upstairs, the fans and media, they see that and think you’re mad at me.  I told him don’t get mad at me, get mad at the guys who are hitting.”

Wynn had suffered from gout since the 1950 season, and pitched in pain for the last half of his career.  Still, he kept in good shape, and his fastball remained sharp as he approached his 40^th birthday.  Lopez kept Wynn at the top of the Chicago rotation, and in 1959, everything clicked for both Wynn and the White Sox.  On May 1, the 39-year-old pitched a one-hit shutout against the Boston Red Sox, and hit a home run that provided the only scoring in the 1-0 victory.  He led the league in innings pitched, started the first All-Star Game for the American League, and won a league-leading 22 games, pitching the White Sox to their first American League flag in 40 years. Wynn’s 21^st win of the season, a 4-2 victory over Cleveland on September 22, clinched the pennant and set off a night of celebration on Chicago’s South Side.  At season’s end, Wynn won the major-league Cy Young Award.

The White Sox faced the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1959 World Series, and Wynn pitched seven shutout innings in the opening game, teaming with reliever Jerry Staley to defeat the Dodgers by an 11-0 score.  However, he struggled in the fourth contest, played at the Los Angeles Coliseum before 92,650 fans.  Wynn failed to complete the third inning of a game that the White Sox eventually lost, 5-4, though Staley was the losing pitcher.  In the sixth game, played in Chicago, a six-run Dodger rally in the fourth inning knocked Wynn out of the game and saddled him with the Series-ending defeat.

Wynn’s 13 wins in 1960 left him with 284 career victories, and the pitcher announced his intention of joining the 300-win club before his retirement.  He pitched well in 1961, with eight wins in his 10 decisions, but arm soreness, caused by gout, ended his season in July.  He gave up eating meat in an attempt to control his gout problem, but the pain persisted, causing problems with his legs and right hand.  He fell short of his 300^th win in 1962, posting a 7-15 record while relying mostly on a slider and a knuckleball.  His seventh win, a complete-game effort against the Senators on September 8, was the 299^th of his career, but Wynn failed in three subsequent attempts to gain his 300^th victory.  The White Sox were convinced that the 42-year-old pitcher had reached the end of the line, and in November the team released him.

The White Sox invited Wynn to their 1963 spring training camp, but he failed to make the team.  He returned home to Florida, where he stayed in shape and waited for a call from another club.  A few teams offered Wynn one-game contracts, seeking to capitalize on his quest for 300 wins, but he held out for a season-long deal.

In June his old club, the Cleveland Indians, signed Wynn for the rest of the season and put him in the starting rotation.  On July 13, in his fourth start of 1963, Wynn won his 300^th game.  However, by this time in his career, he had simply lost his stuff.  Opposing Kansas City batter Ed Charles recalled Wynn’s 300th win: “His fastball, if it reached 80, that was stretching it.  He was laboring, throwing nothing but bloopers and junk.”  Nonetheless, Wynn left the game after five innings, and the bullpen preserved the victory, Wynn’s last.  Said Wynn, “I was exhausted.”
Wynn started only one more game for Cleveland and retired at the end of the season, ending his career with a record of 300-244 and an Earned Run Average of 3.54.  He remained with the Indians, succeeding Mel Harder as Cleveland’s pitching coach in 1964.

He moved to the Minnesota Twins in 1967 and then managed in the minor leagues for several years.  He also worked as a broadcaster for the Toronto Blue Jays and the Chicago White Sox.

He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in1972.

Early Wynn died on April 4, 1999 in Venice, Florida at age 79.
A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by David Fleitz.  It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org

Leave a comment at the BHP web site at baseballhistorypodcast.com or write a review on iTunes, search for Baseball History Podcast.

You can email me at baseballhistory@gmail.com.

Well, that’s it for today’s Baseball History Podcast.  I’ll see you later at the ballpark.